“Summertime in the french countryside is the smell of ripening fig trees and the taste of wild blackberries.”

“The french language is emotive. The verbs are strong and definite. The nouns are masculine or french. I could never understand why the farm would be feminine yet the farmhouse masculine; the pear and apple trees masculine yet the fruit feminine.”

“Learning a language happens in stages, and the first breakthrough is a limited understanding. Somehow the words began to make sense; I could not respond, yet I had a vague comprehension of what had been said.”

“But many details were considered too small and mundane for the Centurions' purposes. They tapped the mud too briefly for things like new-fangled coffee-makers to matter. Instant coffee that tasted like a wet dream was apparently one of them.”

“He invaded my consciousness in the same way the ocean washes up on the beach, with sweeping tides of longing and regret, and with such power and raw force, I often woke with the taste of salt from my tears clinging to my skin." Joanna about Ben”

“ 'I scrape under a nail and I pull out dirt. I pull off an overlay and I smell urine. It's the rot of their lives seeping into their nailbeds, you see? They can fix their hair and paint their nails and run on a treadmill until they're anorexia's poster child, but they can't fix their lives...lives of rotting perfection.' ”

“You must be very embarrassed," I heard myself say.He snorted and tightened his grip. "I hardly find slicing E'than'i'el open embarrassing. And you have other things to worry about. Like the fact that, over the long years of my exile, I have developed a taste for human hearts.""Right. Of course." I took a deep, steadying breath. "I only meant that I would die of shame if I had thousands of years of pictures of me in a diaper with feather dusters on my back.”